The Wife Tree (27 page)

Then one mild Saturday in January when Katherine and I were walking home from the grocery store, we met on the sidewalk a man pulling two blond toddlers in a handsome red sled. It was Katherine’s employer. He was short, stocky, relaxed, kind-looking, with a long nose, bright blue eyes, a weekend stubble. He’d been out wandering there in the streets, pulling these twins, over in our poor neighbourhood where, finely dressed in a leather jacket with a beaver collar, soft kid gloves, he’d no real business. His eyes slid away from mine.

“I was hoping you were out walking,” he said, smiling at Katherine, almost able to hide his disappointment at not finding her alone. “Mary’s been called away unexpectedly. Her mother’s sick. It’s just me and the kids for the next few weeks.”

He was no child. He must have been in his mid-thirties, old enough to know how destructive a dalliance can be. I wanted, against my better instincts, to trust him. I thought that, by virtue of his wealth, he understood levels of contentment that I couldn’t even imagine, that he had quantities of happiness to give away.

Embarrassed by my shabby coat, by the holes in my wool gloves, I moved a few steps along the snowy sidewalk, my gaze turned away, pretending not to observe, waiting patiently. Our arms were full of paper grocery bags. I stood there shifting the weight and wondering when Katherine and this lawyer would finish talking so that we could go home and unburden ourselves. She was nervous and smiling and not herself. I’d never seen her more lovely. Of all my girls, she was the most beautiful. I noticed that her thick auburn hair had begun again to shine with health, that her ivory skin glowed. On the way home, I wanted to say to her: You’ve lain down with this man, haven’t you? In motel rooms or in some privacy you’ve found in his offices? And though I saw
that she and I were now splitting apart like two human cells, that her future would have nothing to do with mine, that she wouldn’t, after all, lead me wisely, joyously, out of my life, my heart leapt with happiness for her.

Did Katherine see the recklessness, the envy, the consent in my face that afternoon as we walked home from the store? The following day, Sunday, she didn’t come home to sleep. I lay awake all night, picturing her in the lawyer’s fine stone house, in a bed with the smell of another woman’s skin on the sheets. Very early on Monday morning, Katherine — perhaps distracted with happiness, with passion — came in, unwisely, just as William was leaving for work.

“Where were you?” he demanded.

She stood in the front hall with a dusting of snowflakes on her shoulders and her winter boots still on her feet. She unbuttoned her coat and turned to hang it up on one of the long row of hooks.

“You look at me when I’m talking to you!” William shouted. “You’ve got a helluva nerve! Do you know what time it is? Where were you last night? Were you sleeping with that bastard?”

“Oh, William,” I said sadly.

“Were you?”

“He’s not a bastard,” Katherine answered him evenly.

“I’ll go over there and kill that son of a bitch,” William said. In his government uniform, he looked like a shouting soldier.

“She’s an adult, William,” I said. “She’s making a free choice.”

“Not while she lives under my roof, she’s not! You quit that job,” he warned Katherine. “You stop seeing him or get out of this house!”

All day Monday, the lawyer didn’t call to ask why Katherine hadn’t shown up for work, perhaps reading the answer in her absence. I sensed her listening, in vain, for the ring of the phone. Late in the afternoon, I sat on a stool at her knee and took her hand in mine.
She looked suddenly old. Overnight, she’d changed from a young woman into an old child and this old child was filling the rooms of the house with her numbness, her asphyxiating sorrow.

“What do you suppose this lawyer is thinking now?” I asked her gently. “What do you imagine he wants?”

She just turned her face away from me and said, “I don’t know. Oh, Mom, stop asking me questions. I don’t know the answers. I don’t have any answers to anything.”

“Can you call this man? Can you speak to him?” I persisted. “Can you find out what his intentions are? Because you probably think he loves you. And possibly he does.”

I said “love” not because I believed in it but because I knew she was holding on to the word like spring water cupped in the hands. Any false word or move, any doubt, and the precious liquid might trickle away wastefully between her young fingers.

“Are you in love with this man?” I pressed her. “Is he in love with you? Would he leave his wife for you, do you think? Do you feel you’re earning enough money to move out, get your own room somewhere? Have you thought about that? Because you probably can’t give up this man, at least not immediately, and clearly you can’t stay here. Staying here with your father would be very destructive for you. You must get out as soon as you can.”

“Well, what’s she decided?” William, arriving home from work that night at six o’clock, indicated our closed bedroom door. “Is she in there? Did she go in to work today?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“It’s finished, then?”

“I suppose so.”

“I’d like to hear her say the words.”

“Oh, William, leave her alone. Don’t belabour the point. You
got what you wanted, didn’t you? Are you happy now?” I asked, but he only scowled at me and went to wash up for supper.

That night the temperature outside plummeted to twenty below zero. At two a.m., when I went from bed to bed checking to see if all the children were warmly covered, I noticed Katherine’s absence. I assumed she’d slipped away to meet the lawyer, to discuss the future. In the morning I descended the cellar stairs as usual to shovel coal into the furnace. Moments later, standing at the kitchen window to watch the sun come up, my ankles burning with the dry heat blasting out of the radiators, I flipped open my cigarette lighter and was striking the spark wheel when I noticed a dark figure prostrate near the curb.

Running outside in my slippers and housecoat, I found Katherine lying in the snow. It must have been the simplest thing she could think of, a slow, uncomplicated finish requiring only patience, stoicism to carry it out. It had been a moon-filled night and the stars were at their most brilliant, as they often seem to be just before the sun comes up and the moon sinks. I lifted Katherine’s stiff shoulders and rested them on my lap and wept and felt the snow melting against my fifty-two-year-old knees.

Down the street a car door slammed, headlights flashed on: someone going off to work on an ordinary Tuesday morning. The paper boy came along in the dark with his canvas bag on his shoulder and stood a yard away, shuffling to keep his feet warm and looking at me with a paper boy’s deep passive knowledge of solitude, of the follies, the griefs, the sins of pre-dawn neighbourhoods and illuminated houses, their windows naked to the passerby. He was a homely boy, his thick black hair cut all around in a bowl shape.

“You’ll get cold kneeling there,” he told me, no reference to Katherine, as if to say:
She’s dead. You can’t revive her. Accept it. Move
on
. This is the task of paper boys: to keep moving. “You better go inside,” he told me, his breath hanging between us, a frozen cloud.

Just then Conte — alerted to my trouble by the presence of the loitering newsboy? — ran out of his house.

“Move along now,” he chided the young man. “Don’t stand there staring. It’s none of your business. Go on. Get out of here.”

Conte gripped me by the shoulders and when he found he couldn’t pull me away from Katherine, he ran and pounded on our front door and woke William up. William came out in his pyjamas and wept in the sub-zero temperatures when he saw Katherine dead. He lifted her frozen body out of the snow and turned away. From the porch, with Katherine stiff as an ice sculpture in his arms, he shouted, “Morgan, get up out of that snow. What use are you to anyone, kneeling there? Go into the house. Put some clothes on. See to the children,” and I went in, past Conte, who stood on the lower step, his chin on his chest.

That afternoon, the neighbourhood children, returning from school, milled about on the sidewalk, looking at the hollow formed in the snow by Katherine’s body, at the big footprints in the driveway made by the ambulance workers, the policemen.

Katherine wasn’t buried, of course, until spring, when the earth softened. As we couldn’t afford a headstone, the grave was marked with a simple brass plaque set in the ground. I didn’t attend the interment or ever see her grave. I couldn’t make myself go and look at it. That summer, however, William, passing by the cemetery, parked his pickup truck outside the iron gates and went in to pay his respects. He climbed up the gentle knoll and went down the other side, past the old knotted willow trunks to where the sloping land gave a view of factories, railway tracks, working-class homes blackened with soot. He discovered a beautiful headstone standing
on Katherine’s grave. Who could have put it there but the lover?

William came directly home, returning to the cemetery with a sledgehammer. He knocked the headstone down and shattered it into a hundred pieces. The earth around Katherine’s coffin must surely have shaken with his blows, so that even in death she couldn’t escape his fury. Why did William destroy the stone? What was his anger all about? Did it have to do with the weight swinging in his balls? Was it the rage of his own unsown seed? For don’t all men want to have these seeds pouring out of them continuously, like a viscous river? Don’t they long for the supreme, the unsurpassable happiness of shooting their milk into a woman’s body? Nothing in life, no other joy, seems to compare with this. And doesn’t all moral outrage, when it comes to sex, have to do with envy, with one’s own hunger for the same forbidden fruit? But William could have emptied all the seed he’d ever sown — and more — onto Katherine’s grave, and still he couldn’t have brought her back.

Lawyers are tenacious people, bent on winning. Comfortable in his great stone house with the bright red door and the long black shutters and the row of dormers pushing through the steep black roof, all the wealthy lover needed to do was lift the telephone receiver from its cradle, give instructions to the carver, to the engraver of headstones, and another monument would be erected. After William knocked the first headstone to pieces, the lawyer put another up and another, each more elaborate than the one before, with Greek urns and flowing stone drapery and elaborate crosses and finally a kneeling angel, life-size, praying under a marble arch. William didn’t bother to strike the fourth one down. Did he understand at last that the lawyer had more money than he, her father, had energy to undo these tributes to Katherine? And that he — William — could beat every last one of these gravestones to
a fine powder and still he couldn’t destroy the idea that his daughter had slept with a married man?

The past! How much more of it can I bear?

Last night it began to rain heavily and when I awoke this morning it was still coming down in sheets. I got up and went into the kitchen to make breakfast, only to discover that the stove wouldn’t work, nor would the lights. Soon I realized that the house was growing very cold, that the comforting hum of the furnace and its gentle vibration weren’t rising as usual through the floorboards. If only we still had the reliable coal-driven furnace William so cleverly replaced with an electrical one, I thought. Pulling a sweater and thick wool socks out of my bureau drawers, I layered them on. Throughout the morning, I padded from window to window watching the silent falling of the rain. I saw no children journeying to school, their figures usually like dark pilgrims against the sagging snowbanks, on this, the last day before Christmas break. Not a single car passed on the glassy road. For all I knew the world had ended, myself its only survivor. I picked up the phone, listened to dead air.